Monday, March 14, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Savage City by L. Penelope

 




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 31, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Savage City is the start of a new series of fantasy romance series by author L. Penelope, who I've previously encountered for her "Earthsinger Chronicles", another fantasy romance/epic fantasy series, which just finished with 4 novels a little while back (and 3 novellas).  I kind of grew to really really like Earthsinger, whose first book had a solid pair of main characters but little else, but grew more and more complicated and filled with good characters, till it became really interesting, which characters and romances I really liked and cared about.  Still, the series seemed to grow too complicated for Penelope to finish it with a truly satisfying conclusion to its many themes and ideas, which were really interesting as they were built up.  

And Savage City reminds me a bit of the first Earthsinger novel (Song of Blood & Stone) - it's got some very solid interesting characters from different sides of a conflict, some interesting themes, and is just too short to really explore it all.  The central romance features Talia, a girl from our own world, who upon death finds herself in a fantasy world as the missing daughter of an oppressive but loving father, and Ryin, a member of an oppressed people acting as a prisoner of war as he attempts to plot a revolution.  The setup is familiar in some ways but well done, and the characters are generally pretty enjoyable, but certain conflicts (the forbidden nature of their love, the comfort of having a loving parent vs the fear such a parent is wrong, etc.) just don't have enough time to make an impact.  

Still there's enough here - when combined with Penelope's past history with her Earthsinger Chronicles - for me to be interested in going forward, and others may like this a bit more.  


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Talia lived her whole life without love, first with her mother before her first accident, and then with her father and stepmother afterwards.  And so when a car accident takes her life seemingly for the second time, she doesn't have much hope for the afterlife.  But instead of heaven or hell, Talia finds herself in a strange world under attack from dangerous beasts, until she is rescued by humans who can seemingly transform into animals....and who think she is their lost princess.  And when Talia finds out the King looks just like her old father, but actually cares and loves his daughter, she wants to pretend she is his daughter....except for the clear fact that the King oppresses and enslaves the Fai people for little reason other than cruelty in acts that horrify her completely.  

Ryin is on the surface a captured Fai warrior, forced to use his healing abilities in service of the hated Nimali.  But secretly, Ryin has been plotting for the day his people will rise up and fight back, learning the people and ways of the Nimali such that he can fight for his people's freedom....and get revenge on either the King or the Prince who killed his sister.  But when Ryin gets assigned to watch and shadow the newly found Princess, he finds a woman who is a lot more caring than he ever imagined, and he begins to have feelings he shouldn't...especially when his Fai allies begin a plan to take her hostage to take advantage of the King.  

Soon Talia and Ryin will find themselves drawn close together, and their love, and the forces that put them in their tenuous situations, will change everything.....
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Savage City has a setup that isn't exactly unusual, but is pretty well done once it leaves our world and gets to the fantasy world.  You have two peoples - the Nimali and the Fai - each of whom has different ideas about how one should use Bliss, the magical resource they each use to power their technology and their own forms of magical transformations.  The Nimali have a caste system that is oppressive of their own people, and under the King, they oppress the Fai, who they want to conquer and erase so they can have all the Bliss on their own; and what Fai they capture they force to lose either their voice, their shadow, or their memory so they can force them to serve as servants....or worse as mindless slaves.  It's hardly an unusual setting these days, but Penelope makes it work extremely well, especially with how different people in the systems have different views on how to change or keep the status quo - from the Prince who clearly is plotting a coup to change things, to the lost princess who surprisingly was willing to elevate two girls from a lower caste, to the various Fai who want to try to change things possibly by working with the Talia they think is a princess to those who instead want to use her as leverage.  

This setting allows for each of our main duo to have to adapt and to face growing internal conflicts, especially as they get close to one another.  For Talia, she has to deal with the fact that as much as she wants the attention and love of her father, her father and his people are horribly cruel and oppressive in ways that make her sick, and she can't simply stand by and do nothing.  And when it comes for Talia seeing Ryin and the other Fai, she just can't bear to see what the Nimali have done to them and thinks naturally that they should hate her for it.  For Ryin the conflict comes from his awareness of how Talia, who he thinks is the princess, is truly kind and caring, and thus when some arrogant and impulsive Fai hatch a plot to capture her and use her for ransom, he finds himself conflicted between growing feelings and his need to help his people.  And so the two find themselves conflicted even as their attraction pushes them together, until a finale allows them to finally fight together.  

Still the problem is that well, this book is awfully short, and too short for either these conflicts or the romance to really get enough page time.  So Talia's conflict over the love she wants from her "father" is basically over pretty quickly, as she never spends practically any time with the King without him possibly reminding her of how awful he is, never really forcing her to make a difficult choice.  And the romance between them ignites about 66% of the way through, but just sort of all of a sudden (especially from Talia's perspective), whereas it could use a bit more time smoldering to make the two's giving in to their feelings mean more, so as to emphasize Ryin's conflict.  It just feels like a lot of shortcuts were taken, robbing some of this story's themes and romantic parts of their impact.  

Still, a similar issue was what I felt with the first Earthsinger Chronicle book, so I'm hopeful book 2 and beyond, now that this setting is established, will be both longer in length and feature relationships with more depth that I can enjoy.  In short, Savage City is a solid series starter, even if it's too short to really be a book that is worth highly recommending on its own as a stand alone, even though the ending is conclusive of the main relationship.  

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